My journey so far….

Friends, here am back after a while to share the journey of my life (its a long post). This post is initiated by an ex colleague of mine, who requested me to post the success story of my life so far…

After my schooling I got into engineering line with my stream being civil, my elder sister was in the same college with computer as her main stream. Computers and design always fascinated me and when she use to discuss computers with her friends I use to get inclined to her discussions. Then I decided no matter what I will learn computers.

After my engineering, I decided to pursue 1 yr PGDCA and joined informatics computer education. After completing 6 months of my course, the director of informatics computer education approached me with the teaching offer…it was a dream come true for me “earn while you learn” and I agreed.

Mornings I use to attend my classes and remaining time I use to teach. During my free time, one day I was browsing through my labs computer and found a software called corel draw. I was just playing around to understand what it is and then realized I can do wonders in corel draw. As design was always my passion, I figured out lot of similar tools like photoshop, pagemaker etc and learnt them on my own.

I was so addicted to design that even after reaching home I use to stick to my computer and do photoshop or corel draw. My dad use to shout a lot at me whenever he saw me designing, because for him computers were meant to do only programming. My dads anger made me more rigid and to avoid bombardments, I started using computers at night when he slept.

My director was very impressed with my learning capabilities and decided to train me how to work on internet. He arranged a 1 week training for me and this internet training was a turning point in my life…

All sorts of things started tickling my mind, how is web pages created, how we can see them from anywhere in the world, what programming language is used to code blah blah…this curiosity inclined me to research on internet and websites and this is how I pursued my diploma in web technology while continuing my job.

I have a passion towards anything new..new technology, new skills, new gadgets, new tools, new concept and this passion helped me a lot to make my career into web designing n development.

Soon I got opportunity to work with companies like Vishwatech, AOL, MindTree, Yodlee and now Kony. I learnt a lot in all these companies and fine tuned my skills from web design & development to desktop and mobile application development as well as usability and user experience.

During my MindTree tenure, I learnt a lot about usability and user experience, web 2.0 and started a web 2.0 community so that all like minded and interested people can join and learn from it. This community gave me another thought, why can’t I create a community outside the organization so that others can also benefit and this is how the “user experience” group in linkedin was created, which is a very successful group with 28,167 members as of now.

All the while, I wanted to pursue higher studies and enhance my educational skills along with my professional skills and this is how I ended up pursuing my MBA from Northern California University. I will write a separate post on this soon…..

I am really thankful to each and everyone who believed me, supported me and encouraged me in all that I am able to achieve today and thanks for being a part of my journey………

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PRAYAGA

SHYAMALA

A little something about me!

My name is Shyamala pronounced as shaa-ma-la and I am a UX evangelist with 19 years of experience as a UX designer with hybrid skills of UI and UX. I have experience in UX and UI designing on both mobile and desktop applications and have been part of designing some award-winning mobile applications.

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I am a civil engineer by education and before moving into user experience I worked as an architect with a construction firm for 2 years. My passion for design and building great things for users pushed me into the UX domain. I am a self-made UX designer with no formal educational background into UX, but my passion helped me enter and succeed in user experience.